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Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Sharing Death, Sharing Life

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Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.

They were words that controlled us, like an electric fence to wandering minds and quaking bodies. The pastor repeated them to us frequently—at each hospital visit and in every triumphant prayer for healing within an oncology ward that seemed only to delve out the certainty of loss and the overthrow of control. His confident battle cry was so certain, so instructive: We will not fathom defeat; we will not even think about death. In the name of Jesus, we will see the evidence of healing though it is yet unseen. Despite a theology that under normal circumstances would have been bold enough to voice some very serious objections, I so badly wanted my dad to be well… So badly that we never spoke of his wishes for the funeral we would plan only weeks later.

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen. They are the words of the ancient writer of Hebrews, though the way we used them during those short weeks with an aggressive cancer never actually considered this. It was a verse we treated as if it pertained only to us, jarred loose from its story and author and community. Once loose, we used it as a tool to jar my dad from his own flesh, from his pained and embodied life as a creature in his final days. We were after a miracle that would erase life as it had become, a healing that would restore us back to life before cancer. We used the verse, distorted into an individualized half truth, to keep ourselves from considering anything more.

Sadly, the God these prayers envisioned was more like a slot machine than a sovereign, each prayer a spin that tried to muster hope against all odds, fearfully, as if dad’s life depended on the very quality of our mustering. While I don’t doubt the charitable intentions of those prayers—or the belief in a God who heals—I am saddened by the selfishness I didn’t want to see as I uttered them. The words we clung to were far more about the survivors than the dying one we loved or the abundant life we professed together in the crucified Christ—even in our own deaths. We clung to this creature-denying posture at the expense of one embodied by the vicariously human Christ himself, a posture that could have been both a sharing of my dad’s pain and a sharing of life and death with the one who holds both.

What might this shared experience in the body of Christ have actually looked like? Tragically and beautifully, it is coming into focus in the life of a friend. In October of 2012, at the age of 39, Christian theologian Todd Billings was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a rare and incurable blood cancer.(1) The sense of loss in his story is enough to send some us desperately after those confidently spoken, individualized half truths, like those we held in our own cancer story. Billings has not been a stranger to such prayers uttered on his behalf. But he wrenchingly embodies another way.

In the fog of days following his initial diagnosis, through a bone marrow transplant and quarantine to a drastically new ‘normal’ and a chemo regimen he will be on for the rest of his life, he realized he needed a language that didn’t dodge the hard theological and existential questions, a language that could bring all he is experiencing before God and to help him share it with others. He found himself sharing the language of lament with the writers of Scripture, who are honest and angry, grief-stricken and laid low by their own losses—and are yet able as creatures to bring these encounters before God in a way that does not “diminish the material, embodied nature of my life as a creature, my life as one who has been united to the resurrected Christ but is still groaning for the new creation.”(2)

For the Christian, this is the difficult, beautiful way of the cross: We die and live in and through the crucified Lord. We pray for Christ’s cross-shaped kingdom to come. We live in fellowship with a Triune God whose story of restoration incorporates brokenness, even and ultimately, his own. Alternative ways might be easier but they are not Christ’s. Writes Billings, “[C]onfidently spoken half truths can never reach beyond half truth because they are unwilling to face the biblical paradoxes inherent in orthodox Christianity. Such half truths have always been a temptation because they present a path that is less formidable than fully belonging ‘body and soul, in life and in death—to Jesus Christ.’”(3)

In dire contrast, this proclamation that “I am not my own, but I belong—body and soul, in life and death—to Jesus Christ,” is a shared confession and language that changes dramatically the space in which friends and family, students and colleagues, fellow Christians and even strangers are invited to stand as fellow creatures. Billings is honest about the loss, which gradually sets in and alters expectations of the future: the sudden sense of decades stolen, the new reality of life with an incurable illness. He is honest that the loss is not only his own: it is agonizingly a loss for his wife and their two young children. It is a loss for his friends and his community of faith. Admission of the loss itself may seem simple, but anyone who has ever experienced loss will recognize it as an invitation to break through the temptation for easy answers, to wrestle honestly with a fellow mortal in pain and the mystery of Christ crucified, who offers a truth big enough to hold us all.

Todd Billings sees his cancer story in a story bigger than his own, and in this bigger story, he has been able to invite his own communities to share more deeply the paradox of an adopted life in Christ and the reign of death around us as we wait for the fullness of that adoption. “God’s story does not annihilate my cancer story,” he writes, “but it does envelop and redefine it. Indeed, it asks for my story to be folded into the dying and rising of Christ as one who belongs to him.”(4) This is no pat-answer; it is neither a denial of the dark reality of cancer nor the God who heals. It is the hopeful way of life and death with the only one able to hold them both, the true sharing of which is perhaps more miraculous than even our most desperate prayers can imagine.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) J. Todd Billings shares his story in Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2015).

(2) Ibid., 118.

(3) Ibid., 171, quoting Heidelberg Catechism, Question and Answer 1.

(4) Ibid.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry –  Through Wilderness

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“The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered to him” (Mark 1:12-13).

Mark’s record of the Spirit’s compelling Jesus into the wilderness immediately following his baptism has always intrigued me. The original language is so forceful as to imply that the Spirit literally expelled Jesus into this land of wild beasts and satanic attack. It is even more striking when compared to Matthew and Luke’s gospels, which both suggest that Jesus was “led by the Spirit” into the wilderness.(1) Despite Matthew and Luke’s gentler version, the force is still the same—the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness to be tested, nay, tormented. Why would the Spirit compel Jesus into the land of testing?

The history of Israel and particularly the Exodus from Egypt gives us some perspective on this question. After four hundred years of oppression and enslavement, God sent Moses to deliver the people and to lead them into the Promised Land. A great drama ensues between the “gods” of the Egyptians and the God of Israel. Ten plagues fall, the sea is parted, and the Egyptian army is swallowed up by the raging waters. And then we read, “Moses led Israel from the Red Sea, and they went out into the wilderness of Shur; and they went three days in the wilderness and found no water…. and the whole congregation of the sons of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness.”(2) Israel would spend the next forty years, the text tells us, wandering in that wilderness of lament and bitterness. A great beginning stalls in the deserts of Sinai.

Like Israel before him, Jesus’s story as recorded by Mark begins with great drama. John the Baptist announces the Deliverer; Israel’s exile was over, for the Messiah had come. The Deliverer is baptized by John and in front of the crowds declared “the beloved Son” of God. What a tremendous beginning to his earthly ministry. And yet, like Israel, Jesus begins that earthly ministry not with healings and miracles, or with fanfare and great teachings, but by being “immediately cast out into the wilderness.”

Jesus, many commentators have suggested, was re-enacting the great history of Israel in his own life and ministry. He was Israel’s Messiah, their deliverer, just as Moses had been. Yet, like Israel, Jesus would be tested and his test had to precede entry into the Promised Land. But unlike Israel, Jesus would pass the test and his deliverance of his people would be his gift and offering to God for all eternity.

There are moments when I am particularly mindful that before we can enjoy the promised land of resurrection life, we too must journey with Jesus into the wilderness. I do not go through a single day without hearing many stories about the wilderness spaces people dwell in through suffering, disappointment, doubt, or sin. Often, we want to rush through the wilderness to get to the other side. But, like Jesus, we too must travel through wilderness places. Like Jesus, we will be compelled into that wilderness where there are deaths and deprivations. The wilderness is a place of testing. In the wilderness of unmet needs, what do we do? Who will we turn to? In what, or in whom, do we place our trust? When the Israelites faced their test in the wilderness they wanted to return to the enslavement of Egypt. At least, they fantasized, they had food and drink in that land. Jesus, on the other hand, took nothing with him into that desiccated place. He was hungry and enticed to turn stones into bread to meet his legitimate need. Yet in the face of hunger pangs and thirst, Jesus remembered that the source of his life was in the very word of God and his life would be sustained by “every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.” Jesus trusted God to provide in God’s time and manner.

Often, we ask God “why” we are compelled into the wilderness. We grumble and complain in our lament and try to hurry our way into the Promised Land by forcing our own way or by seeking to return to Egypt to meet our needs in our time and through our own methods. The journey of all Christ-followers is a journey through the wilderness towards the cross. We cannot escape it, nor can we go around it. And yet, the wilderness, the cross, and the ultimate resurrection of Jesus all demonstrate that no matter the wilderness we find ourselves in, God will bring us through to life on the other side. We will not be delivered from the suffering of the wilderness, but with God’s help we can indeed be transformed by it.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) Matthew 4:1; Luke 4:1.

(2) Exodus 15:22; 16:2.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Face in the Crowd

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I confess that I am often overwhelmed by the cacophony of good and honest causes that call out in dire need for supporters. Because of donations made in lieu of flowers at many funerals, it sometimes seems I am on every list of every drive that comes to our area. Similar donations in the names of deceased friends and relatives who requested a particular charity or ministry be remembered also keep me well-informed of need. Long after the donation is processed, I remain on these lists. I am inundated by causes that legitimately cry out for help, calling me to see the world through the eyes of a child, a recovering drug addict, victims of sex-trafficking, cancer, and earthquakes. Whatever your belief-system or creed, the haunting crescendo of heartfelt cries is never easily met with a deaf ear. There is so much need.

“When the foundations are being destroyed,” cried the psalmist, “what can the righteous do?” When need is deep and poverty unplumbed, when hopelessness seems one long, uninterrupted lament—from screams of natural disaster and tears of economic disaster to the silenced cries of injustice across the world—what can I do? When the decision to support one cause is a decision against supporting another, when money can only go so far and can hardly touch the depths of the issues around us, we can become not only paralyzed to make the decision, but inclined to take a large step away from all of it. And I, for one, often euphemize my mental retreat to the one asking for support: “Not at this time,” “I will think about it,” or even worse, “Let me pray about it.” For behind my words is too often a manifestation of indifference. “Wait” almost always means “never.”

In his letter from a Birmingham jail, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. responded to fellow American clergy who were asking him to wait for a better time to pursue the cause of justice in the South. “Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait,’” he wrote. “But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill with impunity your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society….when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”(1) To call for those suffering to wait is to institutionalize our apathy.

Though at times unconsciously taken, our steps away from the center of the world’s pain to a place where we can clear our heads and find perspective are invariably steps toward putting it out of our heads. Requesting time to think, we are requesting time itself to stop. We are asking those with urgent needs to pause for the sake of our own relief. We ask those affected by injustice and hunger, darkness and pain, racism and religious persecution to cover their faces in nobodiness while we step away from it all to that place where half-truths offer a less taxing way. But as Dr. King observed prophetically, “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”

When Jesus said that we would always have the poor with us, he did not say it with the despair of one who looks around and sees how vast is the need and poverty of a hurting world. He did not say it with apathy or indifference, needing time to step away or find perspective. On the contrary, he said it knowing every face in the immense crowd of nobodiness, knowing every name we would try not to learn when the pain of others becomes unbearable. He said this living in time where tears are real, yet conscious of eternity when tears will be no more, showing us the mindset he longs for us to hold: a non-answer is very clearly an answer. “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me,” he said plainly.

The cries of the oppressed and brokenhearted, the sick and the mortal will continue to resound though many of us sit in comfortable apathy and languid affluence denying our own mortality. And the call of the vicariously human Christ can be heard in the midst of it all, urging us to set aside all that entangles and follow after him and into the heart of it. The poor and the downcast will indeed always be with us, and where we will allow ourselves to see, it will be overwhelming. They need justice, they need mercy, and they need our time—even as Jesus seems to tell us that it is we who are most in need of them. When Jesus told the crowds that the poor would always be near, he said it as if it were a promise that he, too, would be near. He made the comment knowing that throughout most of history the Son of God would not be with us in the flesh. But in the cup of cold water delivered to the thirsty, in reaching out to the one reeling in loss or leveled by illness, he is indeed there among us. He is both the hand extended to the one hurting and the eyes of the one in need—destroying the notion of nobodiness two faces at a time.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 292.

 

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – To Gather and Embrace

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There are moments in our lives that have embossed themselves into our memories. Attached to a strong emotion or event, these scenes remain understandably alive in our minds. Other memories remain tucked away less explicably. We cannot articulate why they have made the indelible imprint that they have. Nor can we explain why they return to the forefront of our minds when they do.

I recalled one such moment recently—a snippet of a conversation more than a decade ago. It is odd that I would recall the conversation at all. At the time, the exchange seemed casual, one of many countless exchanges that bounce out of the mind as quickly as they enter. It was one of many conversations with a trusted mentor and friend, but her words at the time seemed little more than a simple, obvious thought. Yet somehow I remembered presently the concern, unbeknownst to me then, with which she spoke those words. She looked at me and said, “Jill, God needs you to receive the things God places in front of you.” Like a sweater on a warm day, I took her words in their simplicity, and casually tossed them aside. But somewhere in the depths of my mind, they were apparently tucked away until I would stumble across them in another light.

“O Jerusalem, O Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would not have it.” This powerful lament of Christ, recorded in both Luke and Matthew’s Gospels, reminds us that the people of Jerusalem were not indifferent to God. They thought they knew God; in fact, they often thought they were acting on God’s behalf. In Matthew’s Gospel this lament is spoken on the heels of seven woes to the scribes and Pharisees—two other groups who genuinely believed they were fighting to protect the God and the religion they they knew. In Luke’s Gospel, significantly, Christ’s lament follows an invitation toward the narrow door of the kingdom of God.

A great majority of the world today reports some belief in the existence of a divine being. One study on faith and belief among America’s youth describes this often generic credence as belief in a God who wants us to be both good and happy, and who is available in case of emergencies. Sociologist Christian Smith describes this widespread outlook in American teenagers—even across different religious backgrounds—as “moralistic therapeutic deism.” “We have convinced ourselves that this is the gospel,” writes a commenter on these findings, “but in fact it is much closer to another mess of pottage, an unacknowledged but widely held religious outlook that is primarily dedicated, not to loving God, but to avoiding interpersonal friction.”(1)

Jesus’s potent lament and metaphor of a hen who longs to reach out to her chicks proclaims the often tragic nature of our professions and what we attempt to receive in the midst of them—whether denying God altogether, casually professing belief in a distant being, or holding firmly to religion and somehow missing love for God in the process. How oft I would have gathered you as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not have it. The story of humanity seems very often a story of people missing the point; people who don’t even know what we don’t know.

There are certainly many ways of receiving God and the promises of Christ, though we might find in the end that in our receiving we were more realistically trying to avoid something else. The word “receive” in the dictionary lists more than a dozen definitions ranging from “to hear or see,” and “to greet or welcome,” to more weighty definitions such as “to acknowledge formally and authoritatively” or “to bear the weight of.” Examples from human behavior are equally diverse.

At the time of my mentor’s words, I had thoroughly committed myself to the Christian story. The Christian God, I believed, provided the only answers that could really speak to the difficult questions of life. I had thoroughly accepted Christ and considered myself a part of the story of Christianity. Yet I was constantly questioning in my mind whether I knew God personally and often doubted my own identity as a child of God. I know now that my friend was saying that there is an intensely practical side to receiving God that I was missing. There is a point when we must be still and recognize just who we are receiving, just who has been reaching out to gather us all along.

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus proclaims, “I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it” (10:15). The Greek word for “receive,” literally means to take with the hand, to take hold of, and to embrace. Much has been said in scholarship of this reference to coming to God as a little child. Jesus’s use of the word “receive” is equally picturesque. The image painted in the text is certainly worth many words, two figures meriting an impression on both mind and memory. To believe that the God of the scriptures exists is to believe that we as people now stand in the presence of God as a Person. To receive God is to reach out to the very arms that have been longing to gather us near all along.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 10.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry –   Isms and Rabbit Trails

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Among my toughest audiences in apologetics are undoubtedly my two little boys. From the time words started forming on their lips, questions of various kinds have been a staple around our home—the most formidable one being, “Why, daddy?” More than any other of our appetites, I strongly suspect that thirst for knowledge and the occasional thrill of discovery have played the greatest role in shaping history. From the vast machinery of the news media to the intricate systems of the educational enterprise, from specialized research institutions to the multifaceted world of religious devotion, human hunger for knowledge is the oil that greases the mill of civilization.

So pervasive is this drive for knowledge that it can become an end in itself, opening up a rudderless detour along even the journey to God. This is true in religious systems that claim knowledge for a select few, with secretly guarded rituals forever hidden from the uninitiated. Gnosticism, from the Greek word gnosis, which means knowledge, was built upon the premise that there exists a category of knowledge privileged to a select few. Most Eastern religions insist that the problem with humanity is not sin but ignorance; hence, their solution to the human predicament is enlightenment, not forgiveness. Similarly, scientific naturalism stakes its fortunes on the bare, cold facts of particles and quarks; to know them is to know ultimate reality—never mind the minor detail that, logically, there is a gaping missing link between knowing how something works and the conclusion that it was not made.

But according to the Bible, at the end of our incessant pursuit of knowledge lies a Person, not an ideology or impersonal reality. God is not only the beginner of all that is; God has also revealed Himself in the earthliest of terms. Jesus was born in circumstances accessible to the lowliest of the shepherds as well as to the most majestic of kings. He spoke to large crowds in public places and was crucified outside the city walls, thereby silencing forever the voices of self-appointed guardians of alleged esoteric knowledge. In biblical terms, no pursuit of knowledge is ever complete without the discovery of him who is the truth; to know him is to know not only ultimate reality but also ourselves.

For the Christian, then, it is a solemn thought to remember that reducing apologetics to a contest in the abstract can actually keep us from knowing God. Determined to demonstrate the consistency of our beliefs, we can easily find ourselves on endless rabbit trails—pursuing every form of ism, striving to tie each and every loose end in our belief system, finding comfort when we succeed and frustration when we fail—all the time unaware of the beckoning arms of our loving Father who is Himself the treasure we so diligently seek and hope to show others. Like Jewish leaders of old who diligently searched the scriptures but failed to recognize the one to whom they point when he stood before them in human flesh, we can perfect the art of dissecting biblical and philosophical truths with little progress in our knowledge of God—so enamored with the map that we never take a step towards the destination. As C.S. Lewis observes, “There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself…as if the good Lord had nothing to do but exist!“(1)

The God we meet in apologetics is mostly a subject to be studied, a case to be argued, a conclusion to be drawn—a far cry from the God who has revealed Himself both in the scriptures and ultimately in the Person of Jesus Christ. When the pursuit of knowledge becomes an end in itself, the conclusions we accept are decidedly driven by our most cherished passions. Just as it is possible to pursue knowledge simply to satisfy our belief in God without much concern for God, it is also possible to seek it passionately precisely because we disbelieve in God. Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: In our thirst for knowledge, “intent is prior to content.”(2) Our finitude guarantees that there will always be gaps in our knowledge which only omniscience can fill, but God has put enough content in the world to satisfy any honest intent to find God.

Is it pointless then to pant for knowledge? Far be it from me to suggest such a thing! This very piece of writing is an attempt to convey knowledge! And, besides, “It is God’s privilege to conceal things and the king’s privilege to discover them” (Proverbs 25:2, NLT). Whenever I am tempted to disparage the passion for painstaking attention to the seemingly minutiae, I am reminded of the faithful souls who have labored for years to sift through ancient manuscripts and translate them into a language that I can read. We are all beneficiaries of the dedication of others in almost all areas of our lives. Worshiping at the altar of ignorance is no more pious than worshipping at the altar of mental abundance. But those whose pursuit of truth is infused with the purity of spirit discover that, all along, the Father has been seeking such to worship Him.(3)

J.M. Njoroge is a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 71.

(2) Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1996), 98.

(3) See John 4:23.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – To the End

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Professor and theologian James Loder was on vacation with his family when they noticed a motorist off to the side of the road waving for help. In his book The Transforming Moment, he describes kneeling at the front fender of this broken-down car, his head bent to examine the flat tire, when he was startled by the abrupt sound of screeching brakes. A motorist who had fallen asleep at the wheel was jarred awake seconds before his vehicle crashed into the disabled car alongside the road—and the man who knelt beside it. Loder was immediately pinned between two vehicles. The car he kneeled to repair was now on his chest, his own vehicle underneath him.

Years after both the incident and the rehabilitation it required, Loder was compelled to describe the impact of that moment so marked by pain and tragedy, which was unexpectedly, something much more. Loder describes the incident: “At the hospital, it was not the medical staff, grateful as I was for them, but the crucifixes—in the lobby and in the patients’ rooms—that provided a total account of my condition. In that cruciform image of Christ, the combination of physical pain and the assurance of a life greater than death gave objective expression and meaning to the sense of promise and transcendence that lived within the midst of my suffering.”(1)

For the Christian, the crucifixion is the center of the whole, the event that gives voice to a broken, dark, and dying world, and the paradoxical suggestion of life somehow within it. The Christian marks steeples and graves in memory of the crucifixion. The death of Christ is the occasion that makes way for the last to be first, the guilty to be pardoned, the creature united again to its creator. The cross of Christ is the mysterious sign that stands in the center of the history of the world and changes everything. “I have been crucified with Christ,” said one of his transformed followers. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”

The suffering and death of Christ is indeed an image that gives expression to inexplicable tragedy, unnecessary suffering, and perplexing darkness. But the cross is also the event that jarringly marks that suffering, death, tragedy, and sorrow as qualities to which the vicariously human Son of God willingly submitted himself. It is thus that the broken and bleeding Loder could sense his condition understood in the image of a broken and bleeding Christ. “For surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases.” In the cruciform image of Christ on the cross, our own encounters of tragedy are not only affirmed, but held at God’s own volition. From the glory of heaven, Christ has come into the dark world where we stand.

It might be common to think of Christ’s death as a gift of forgiveness and assurance, a radical attempt of God to reach the world in person, a comforting depiction of the depth of divine mercy and hope. The cross is all these things for the Christian indeed, and on most days this vision is enough to quiet restless thoughts and ease unanswered questions. But like life itself, which can lay us low with tragedy, seize our hope and leave despair in its wake, the cross is also more. And Christ speaks into this darkness as only one who is acquainted with it can.

In his essay “Tragedy and Christian Faith,” Hans Urs von Balthasar describes Christ as answering the despair of humanity not by dissolving or disregarding it, “but by bearing that affirmation of the human condition as it is, through still deeper darknesses in finem, ‘to the end’ as love…”(2) That is to say, Christ’s is a love that bears our brokenness as his own, moving though still deeper darknesses, and bearing it to the end. At the center of the Christian faith is one who is not alien to tragedy, a savior not complacent in the face of suffering. Christ is neither blind to the pains of the world nor passive aggressive in the face of despair. On the contrary, the cross is a portrayal of passion, not passivity. Christ willingly carried defeat, thirst, and emptiness through the end of the darkness to the ends of himself and the ends of the world. For those who labor in circumstances that attest to the human condition of brokenness, this divine act makes sense of the struggle, brings meaning to our suffering, and makes further accessible the peace of the crucified one Paul described: “[T]hrough him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things by making peace through the blood of his cross.”

Christ does not refuse our sense of tragedy or awareness of pain. He bears it in love, affirming our condition, carrying our sorrows to the end, all the way to the heart of God.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) James E. Loder, The Transforming Moment (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard Publishing, 1989), 2.

(2) The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, Eds. Edward T. Oakes, David Moss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 217.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry –  A Bittersweet Friend

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In today’s world, it is often difficult to summon optimism. Bad news swirls around us blowing our hopes and dreams like leaves in the fall wind. In this gale, we often find it hard to cling to hope and to a sense that the future will be a bright one. In general, I see myself as an optimistic person. I try to find the bright side of bad situations, and I work hard to walk the extra mile to give others the benefit of the doubt in personal relationships. I am not a naïve optimist like the character Pangloss in Voltaire’s biting satire Candide. When it is clear the ship is sinking, I don’t believe everything will be alright nor do I believe, as Pangloss would, that the sinking ship is the best thing that could happen to me. I do all that I can to bail out the rising water, even as I wrestle against the fear and anxiety that accompanies impending disaster!

Yet despite my generally optimistic attitude and outlook, there are times when sadness overwhelms me. It may be a growing storm of weary longing or a tide of lonely isolation that sweeps over me, drowning me with a dolor that submerges my hope. Sometimes it occurs when I think about the aging process and our hopeless fight against it. Sometimes it occurs when I am in the grocery line, looking at the baggers and clerks who wonder if this is all they will ever do for work. Oftentimes, it occurs when I cannot see the good through all the violence and evil that oppresses the world and its people. I can easily become overwhelmed by the numbers of people who are forgotten by our society—the last, the least, and the lost among us—and wonder who is there to help and to save them from drowning.

It is in these times that I befriend lament. And I take great comfort in the loud cries and mourning that have echoed throughout time and history as captured in the poems, songs, and statements of lament. Indeed, a great portion of the Hebrew Scriptures comes in the form of lament, both individual and communal lament. The Psalms, as the hymnal of Israel, record the deepest cries of agony, anger, confusion, disorientation, sorrow, grief, and protest. In so doing, they express hope that the God who delivered them in the exodus from Egypt, would once again deliver by listening and responding to their lament.(1) The prophets of Israel, who cry out in times of exile, present some of the most heart-wrenching cries to God in times of deep sorrow and distress. One can hear the anguish in Jeremiah’s cry, “Why has my pain been perpetual and my wound incurable, refusing to be healed? Will God indeed be to me like a deceptive stream with water that is unreliable?” (Jeremiah 15:18). In addition, Jeremiah cries out on behalf of the people of Judah: “Harvest is past, summer is ended, and we are not saved. For the brokenness of the daughter of my people I am broken; I mourn, dismay has taken hold of me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has not the health of the daughter of my people been restored?” (Jeremiah 8:20-22).

As I listen to Jeremiah’s cries, I recognize that they arise out of a deep love for the very people he often had to speak against. As Abraham Joshua Heschel notes, “[Jeremiah] was a person overwhelmed by sympathy for God and sympathy for man. Standing before the people he pleaded for God. Standing before God he pleaded for his people.”(2) In this same tradition, Jesus cried out with deep longing about the people in his own day, “If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace” (Luke 19:42). It is more than appropriate for us to weep and lament over the terrible condition of the world—a condition that all too often, we participate in and condone.

Many face realities in life that feel completely overwhelming: illness, death and loss, poverty, hunger, job loss or under-employment, relational disruption. Lament seems the only appropriate response for those who find themselves on the losing end of things, or who through no fault of their own always find themselves in last place or left behind. Lament arises from looking honestly at these realities for what they are, and wishing for something else.

Yet it has been said that “the cry of pain is our deepest acknowledgment that we are not home.” The author continues, “We are divided from our own body; our own deepest desires; our dearest relationships. We are separated and long for utter restoration. It is the cry of pain that initiates the search to ask God, ‘What are you doing?’ It is this element of a lament that has the potential to change the heart.”(3) If this is true, then the overwhelming sorrow or feelings of bitterness over having to deal with what feels like more than one’s share of the harsh yet inevitable realities of life are, in fact, the crucible for real change. The same waters of despair that seek to drown and overwhelm can become the waters of cleansing. And in the midst of lament, the writers of Scripture give witness to the overwhelming compassion of God: “For if [the LORD] causes grief, then He will have compassion according to his abundant lovingkindness.”(4) Perhaps, as we remember the one who was described as a man of sorrows who was acquainted with grief, lament offers a crucible in which we might experience a better compassion and care. Indeed, lament may yet have its own way of transformation.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

 

(1) Barish Golan, “A Look at Lament Songs in the Bible,” http://www.disciplestoday.org.

(2) Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper Collins, 1962), 154-155.

(3) Dan Allender, “The Hidden Hope in Lament,” Mars Hill Review, Premier Issue, 1994, 25-38.

(4) Lamentations 3:32.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry –  LEAVE OF ABSENCE

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The deep-seated impression of a parent in the life of a child is a subject well traversed. From pop psychology to history to anthropology, the giant place parents occupy from birth to death is as plain as the life they initiated. Of course, the massive giant which occupies this place may well be the absence of that person, inasmuch as the person him or herself. “It doesn’t matter who my father was,” Anne Sexton once wrote, “it matters who I remember he was.”(1) The looming memory of an absent parent is every bit as big as a present one, maybe bigger. Absence itself can become something of a presence.

It is little wonder that the deepest struggle many of us have with faith is in the absence of God. We learn early that absence is a characteristic connected to despair, wrought from disconnectedness, or born of devastation. We do not see our experience of God’s absence as a subject for lament—like the psalmist’s “Rise up, O Lord; O God, lit up your hand; do not forget the oppressed”—but as a sign of doubt. And so, we often do not know how to reconcile the God who appears in burning bushes and dirty stables, who descends ladders and rends the heavens, but whose crushing silence feels every bit as profound. We don’t know what to do with the ruinous sensation of neglect when God comes so close to some but remains far off from others. We hold in mind the one who came near to the rejected Samaritan woman, but we uncomfortably suspect that we might have been given something else, or worse, that God has for some reason simply withdrawn. The sting of abandonment is overwhelming; with Gerard Manley Hopkins, our prayers seem “lost in desert ways/ Our hymn in the vast silence dies.”

Though it does not always come as a consolation, the Bible recounts similar difficulties and suspicions from some of God’s closest followers. “There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you,” says Isaiah, “for you have hidden your face from us” (Isaiah 64:7). “Why should you be like a stranger in the land,” demands Jeremiah, “like a traveler turning aside for the night?” (Jeremiah 14:8). There is something consoling in knowing that any relationship—even that of a prophet of God—goes through the ebbs and flows of intimacy with the divine. Even the Son of the God cried out at the sensation of God’s withdrawal: “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” Nonetheless, knowing that we are not alone in our pain is not the consolation we seek. Misery’s company does not, any more than reason or rationale itself, have much to say to the child who wants to know why her father left; this is not what she is looking for.

A far better consolation would be the assurance that he never left in the first place. Of course, anyone who has known the sting of abandonment will understandably find such a claim near impossible to fathom. A distant God is every bit as real and hurtful as the disruptive presence of the absent parent. And we have surely known his absence. We have lived with the injurious silence of a one-way relationship. We have known the cold echo of an empty room, unanswered cries, the ache of loss.

But what if the absence of God was not at all like that of an absent parent? What if the moments when God’s distance was most palpable were in fact moments most full of God’s mysterious love? As Alister McGrath suggests in Mystery of the Cross, “God is active and present in his world, quite independently of whether we experience him as being so. Experience declared that God was absent from Calvary, only to have its verdict humiliatingly overturned on the third day.”(2) What if the darkened experiences of God’s distance were filled with the promise that Christ has gone only momentarily to prepare you a room?

Such a leave of absence is no more permanent than the absence of a father who has gone off to work in the morning with the promise to return before bedtime. Such a distance is marked not with isolation and disconnection, but in fact with love and communion. It is the kind of absence that takes on the characteristics of a presence. It is the kind of distance somehow brimming with the promise: I will never leave you or forsake you.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Anne Sexton, “A Small Journal,” in The Poet’s Story, ed. Howard Moss (New York: Macmillan, 1973).

(2) Alister McGrath, The Mystery of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 159.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Squinting at Light

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A Christian believer in the fourth century by the name of Gregory of Nazianzen observed that it is difficult to conceive of God, but that to define God in words is an impossibility. Gregory was not implying that the impossibility of the task means that we should not try. Rather, his words mean to suggest that the subject of theology is, in fact, a Subject. That is to say, Christian theology is the precarious act of peering into the light and glory of a Person. The great councils that gathered in antiquity, the list of faithful pilgrims in the book of Hebrews, men and women in history who have dared to do the work of theology—each of them, and any of us who consider it, are squinting at the mystery of light.

But we do so because the light first shined in the darkness and gave us eyes to see. Who is God? What are God’s attributes? Is Jesus equal to God or subordinate? How do we put into words the logistics of the Trinity? These are questions at very the foundation of theology and the heart of revelation. God has made claims regarding who God is, and theology is looking at what we are to do with them. In this sense, theology is one of the most practical disciplines. It was once even called the Queen of the sciences. Peering into the light, looking at the Person of God, coming to know the one has been revealed to us, we ourselves are changed, reoriented by the one we encounter.

Despite changing centuries and theological concerns, the church affirms it is this same one who has been encountered since the beginning. The people of Israel were shown the power of God to save in Egypt and given the powerful command of the Shema: Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. *The words distinguish God as one, the one Lord beside whom there is no other. The early church professed the same Shema, the same confession of God as one, along with the encounter of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, through whom they believed they saw the Father. “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son,* full of grace and truth.” Adding to this encounter, the early church was also moved by God at Pentecost, where “suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” The encounter of a saving God in history, the knowledge of the glory of the God in the face of Christ, and the presence of the Holy Spirit came together in the lives of believers in what they were eventually convicted to call the Trinity—the presence of three in one.(1)

If it were not yet clear that the work of Christian theology is uncircumscribable, any study of the Trinity will hone in this point. Of course, this is not to say that squinting at this illumined mystery is fruitless except in its capacity to blind our eyes. On the contrary, there is much here to see and consider, much that is both compelling and instructive. Though the word “Trinity” itself does not appear in Scripture, there are several places in the New Testament where Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are described as working together. Asking Jesus to show them the Father so that they could be satisfied, Philip was likely startled, but quite satisfied with the answer. Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). Not long after this, Jesus promised his disciples, “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you” (John 14:16-17). Similar references to such “triadic formulas” of the Trinity appear in the story of the baptism of Jesus, the Great Commission, Paul’s account of spiritual gifts to the church, his words of benediction to the Corinthians, and Peter’s description of God’s work in salvation.

It is indeed clear in the New Testament writings that there are three Persons described in the experience of the one God of the Shema and other confessions. But how are they distinct? And how are they then still one? And what is their relationship with one another? These are questions at the heart of some of the earliest theological controversies in the church, questions which led to some of the church’s earliest creeds. Building on the words of Scripture and Tertullian’s third-century use of the term “Trinity,” the fourth-century writers of the Nicene Creed described the Father as “maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible,” the Lord Jesus Christ as “the only Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages,” and the Holy Spirit as “the Lord, the giver of Life” who “proceeds from the Father and the Son and with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified.” In the fifth century, Augustine further developed the doctrine of the Trinity, helping the church to see God’s absolute unity in the Trinity. While all three members were understood as fully and equally God and identical in substance, they were likewise confessed as distinct in person.

Today, with believers past and present, Christians confess the same, experiencing each of the three persons distinctively, yet receiving one God. God is one, though three; God is unity expressed in community, and the implications of the doctrine of the Trinity are caught up in this divine picture. United with Christ we are brought into communion with the Trinity, which adds a certain and heavenly dimension to our lives; one that indeed correctly and profoundly orients us here and now to the world around us. It means humanity is at its best reflection of God when we are drawn through Christ into redemptive relationships with one another, modeling the love that has been modeled to us in the divine communion of the Trinity.

For those willing to squint along the journey to sight, illumination still begins with Light itself, God unobscured, though incomprehensible, revealed by the Spirit through the glory of the Son. There is indeed a source for all illumination. God is one; the Father who called light into existence, the Spirit who illumines, and Christ who is light of the world.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) The Shema appears in Deuteronomy 6:4-5, the Incarnation of the Word is described in John 1, and the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost is recorded in Acts 2.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Love Sought

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How do you know that God exists? How do you know that God loves you? These questions, upon the hearts of so many, have answers as real as the formative moments in your life.

As I have aged I seem to grow more and more prone to nostalgia. Many of us do this instinctively, clinging to memories past, perhaps looking backwards with the hope of seeing a purpose for our lives. When I travel to India, I make it a point to revisit time and again those significant marking points of my own life. As I recall these moments past but not forgotten, I hear the gentle voice of the God very much in the present. And God says: I was there. When on you were on your bike contemplating suicide, I was there. When you were but nine years old and your grandmother died, I arranged for her gravestone to hold in time the very verse that would lead you to conversion. I was there.

It is often in these harrowing moments—your parents’ divorce, your child’s birth, the death of a loved one—where God leaves a defining mark. There is reason you remember such moments so vividly. We have a choice to hear or to ignore, but regardless his voice cries out in our memories, I was there. God has been in our past. God is here today. God will be there in our future.

God exists, as Lewis worded it so well, in the “eternal now.” And the psalmist, always writing with feet firmly planted in time, but arms ever reaching for the eternal, beautifully explains, “Thou art God from age to age the same.” And while hindsight is often God’s means of gently revealing his presence all along, we can be comforted in the peril of the moment nonetheless. As we encounter these markers in time, our sorrow is held in the beautiful mystery of one who wept with a friend, who answered her question “Where were you?” with tears of his own. Beside Lazarus’s tomb, Jesus offered Mary a glimpse of the present love of God, though he knew a greater future. God was with you then. God is there with you now. And He loves you.

William Shakespeare once reasoned, “Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.” How do you know that God loves you? While you and I were yet wandering, Christ was wandering after us, by way of the cross. Love seeking the lost. And this sacrifice stands as the greatest marker in all time.

Ravi Zacharias is founder and chairman of the board of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Ancient Confessions

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In hallways of antiquity, a gathering of men called the Council of Nicaea commenced at the call of Roman Emperor Constantine in 325 CE. Bishops from around the world came together to unravel the mess of conflicting schools of thought and confession: the logistics of the Trinity, the two natures of Christ, the relation of Jesus to Father and Spirit. Up until this point, there were few formal means to sort through variant teachings and emerging groups, but church leaders recognized that they were at something of a theological crossroads.

Presenting the most formidable challenge to New Testament teaching was a theologian named Arius of Alexandria. Arius envisioned Christ as superior to creation yet neither fully God nor of one substance with the Father. The Council of Nicaea rejected such thinking. On grounds of Scripture, reason, and historical belief, they acknowledged Christ as the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.”(1) The Council recognized in the affirmations of the earliest Christians (including baptismal creeds that spoke in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) a distinct acknowledgement of Jesus’s divinity. If Jesus was not fully God, of one being with the Father and Spirit, he was not really God at all and to worship him was idolatry. But, if Jesus’s own words were to be weighed, if the extra-biblical writings and the overwhelming affirmations of antiquity were to be taken seriously, then Jesus is indeed Lord, the very Word of God sent from the Father, illumined by the Holy Spirit.

Scriptural distinctions of each of the three Persons were thus affirmed, boldly answering variant teachings of who God is with the trinitarian affirmations of what would become the Nicene Creed, which is still confessed in community in many churches today. Each Person of the Trinity was confessed to have a unique role and relationship to one another and creation—though not without cooperation. For the work of God is not divisible; it is the work of one God who interacts with the world. Jesus was quite clear in his description of the cooperation and interrelatedness of Father, Son, and Spirit in his own life and mission. “Very truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing; and he will show him greater works than these, so that you will be astonished” (John 5:19-20). Similarly, Jesus spoke of the interrelation of his role with that of the Spirit. “But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you” (John 14:26). In the words of one theologian, “[A]ll of God is involved in everything God does.”(2)

Yet what is it that Christians confess God does? Beyond ancient affirmations and long-uttered creeds, questions may still remain, and rightfully so. Who is this God? What are God’s attributes? And what does it mean for the world? Here, the divine community that exists between Father, Son, and Spirit remains, as it did for the Council of Nicaea, an illuminative source for answers. This community, bonded by love, having created humankind in God’s image, is a living illustration of God’s loving presence and action in the world, a relational reminder of God’s desire to bring all of creation into the life-giving fellowship of the Trinity. Looking into this image of unity in community, we discover more of who God is and what God does. We see qualities of God’s essential nature and action by considering the love and relationship God models in the Trinity.

The attributes of God are therefore clearest when seen as qualities arising from this divine community: grace and holiness, vulnerability and unconquerability, compassion and justness, omnipotent power and omnipotent love, omniscient wisdom and patience, omnipresence and free presence, eternality and glory. All rise from within a divine community with a unity of purpose and a diversity of actions to fulfill that purpose. For who God is is indelibly connected with what God does.

And in the same way, God’s action and identity are intimately bound up with God’s hope for the world. In the Christian view, when you experience certain virtues such as love, truth, beauty, and justice, you are experiencing a taste of God and God’s reign, the heaven for which we were intended and the one who called the heavens into existence. Attempts to explain such virtues and experiences apart from God remain unfounded. Yet for those drawn further into the restorative fellowship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, God’s action and attributes become something in which we come to participate, too.

To a creation groaning for glory, adoption, action, and redemption, the unique presence of each Person of the Trinity remains a gift of unfathomable proportions. Confessed centuries long before our own, the life-giving, redemptive relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit continues to take the groans of enslaved creatures and exchange them for the glorious freedom of the children of God.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Excerpt from the Nicene Creed.

(2) Shirley Guthrie quoted in Donald McKim, Introducing the Reformed Faith (Louisville: John Knox Press, 2001), 32.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Landscape of Disruption

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The streets were cluttered with trash instead of decorated with flowers. The houses had tarps for roofs, and often no roofs at all. The river water served for bathing, elimination, and drinking water. Bloated stomachs were not full; they were ravaged by parasites. Giant sloths hung lazily from the lush trees seemingly unaware, unaffected, and unbothered by the poverty and disease around them, and pet monkeys and parrots had ample food thrown their way. Yet countless numbers of children searched for food or other treasures among the dirt and filth of garbage piles. Still, laughter, singing, and smiles abounded, and the diverse landscape exuded an exotic vibrancy.

These composite impressions come from my visit to Brazil, a vast and geographically rich country with some of the most impoverished areas in the world. This visit to Brazil several years ago was a vivid example of the experience of personal disruption. Growing up in suburban Illinois, with uniformly similar looking roofed houses, with more than enough food, clothing, and resources to take care of my needs and wants did not prepare me for this encounter with a land of unspeakable beauty and desolation. My disruptive encounter prompted many questions: Why did I have so much when others had so little? What could I do to make any real difference in their situation, and if I could make a difference, what would that look like? More importantly, was this encounter for me to make a difference, or for a difference to be made in me?

Disruption, as Webster’s New Riverside Dictionary defines it, can either be seen as an event that creates confusion and/or disorder, or can be seen as something that interrupts.(1) Of course, disruption creates both. When our beliefs are contradicted by our experience, or challenged by competing and compelling alternatives, we feel disruption. When we encounter something radically different than anything we’ve known or experienced, such as I did in Brazil, we experience disruption. When human relations are frayed or fractured, we experience disruption. Disruption interrupts our perceived self-efficacy and control, and confuses all that we have come to rely on and trust.

Yet, the interruptions caused by disruption can set us on a new course, and introduce us to a whole new horizon much as they did for the early followers of Jesus. Of course, the greatest example of disruption for the disciples played itself out in the events of the Crucifixion. Entering Jerusalem filled with Messianic hope on Palm Sunday, the disciples believed Jesus to be the new King of Israel fulfilling what had been promised to David long ago. Imagine their horror, then, when surrounded in that dark garden of Gethsemane, Jesus was hauled away like a common criminal. Their ideas about the Messiah were disrupted. Instead of royal exaltation, Jesus was lifted up onto a cross of untold suffering and agony. Plans to sit on Jesus’s left and right as rulers in his kingdom were scattered and interrupted, just as quickly as the disciples fled away that terrible night.

But the disruption of the cross would not be the last word. Rather, it is the disruption of the Resurrection that interrupted all that was known about the natural course of life and death, the ideas about the Messiah, and the reality of God’s kingdom. The disruption of the Resurrection affirmed Jesus as God’s Messiah and transformed a group of scattered, fearful, disciples into the heralds of God’s new direction. Peter, the denier, became Peter, the proclaimer. Preaching the first sermon after Pentecost, Peter persuaded those listening that “God raised Jesus up again, putting an end to the agony of death, since it was impossible for him to be held in its power….Therefore, let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made Jesus both Lord and Messiah” (Acts 2:24; 36).

God, the Disrupter interrupted their plans, their ideas, and their entire lives. As a result of this cosmic disruption, everything changed. Rather than scattering in fear, those early Christians gathered together sharing their resources, giving to those in need, and using their possessions for the benefit of one another (Acts 2:42-47). In the same way, God desires the resurrection of Jesus to disrupt our lives, to interrupt our current way of living in order to send us off in a new direction. God intends the disruption of resurrection, much as my encounter with Brazil disrupted my world, to make a difference in us—a difference so disrupting that it alters and changes the way we think, the way we envision the landscape around us, and the way we live in this world. Author Debbie Blue sums up resurrection disruption by saying, “Resurrection is a little unnerving, unsettling, because it basically goes against what we know, contradicts everything we take to be absolute about the nature of history and the reality in which we live. It’s a toppling of the earthly order, overthrowing familiarity. It doesn’t play according to the rules we accept as necessary. If the dead can come back to life…what does that mean about all the other realities, rules that order our lives, that we take for granted? [Resurrection]…is not everything you already know…It’s a whole different landscape.”(2) The disruption of the Resurrection alters everything, every vista, every horizon.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) Webster’s II New Riverside Dictionary, Revised Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 202.

(2) Sensual Orthodoxy (St. Paul, Minnesota: Cathedral Hill Press, 2004), 108-109.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Creation Story

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Someone once told me that the most comforting premise of the Christian imagination was, for her, the assurance of a beginning. Her Hindu upbringing had been far less clear. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…” These very first words of Scripture boldly proclaim that we are not lost and wandering in a cosmic circle of time and accident, isolated from any meaning beyond the name or reputation we manage to carve for ourselves. At the heart of the Christian imagination is one who stood at the foundation of the world, and with love, beauty, and wisdom, caused life and history to begin.

For the Christian, this comforting premise is deepened by the image of creation as the cooperative work of a relational, trinitarian God. The account of creation in the Gospel of John runs parallel to the creation accounts of the book of Genesis, except that John makes it clear that the Father was not acting alone. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”(1) Paul similarly describes the Son’s vital role in creation to the Colossians, referring to Jesus Christ as “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”(2)

The New Testament writers unapologetically affirm the Old Testament understanding of creation’s dependence upon the maker of heaven and earth. But they add to this affirmation the admission that all creation—from the beginning until now—is further seen through the light of Jesus Christ. Christ is the Word of God, existing with God at the beginning. He is the one who called forth the heavens, the one who holds all things together, the one who sustains the universe by his word even now. Here also, like the Son, the Spirit is affirmed in Scripture as present at the beginning and sustaining of all creation: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth.”(3) In the words of Jürgen Moltmann, creation remains a beautiful, collaborative gift: “Creation exists in the Spirit, is molded by the Son, and is created by the Father. It is therefore from God, through God, and in God.”(4)

For someone like my friend, this rightly signals so much more than simply another religion’s means of dealing with the philosophical question of origin. We are given the world via the hands of a good, imaginative, relational creator. In fact, the work of creation is the very overflowing of the divine relationship. Out of an image of the fullness of life in the Trinity, creation is affirmed not as emerging from any lack or need in God, but from God’s loving, good abundance. It is for this reason that creation is affirmed as good throughout Scripture: as the creative overflow of a divine fellowship, creation bears the very image of its creator. It is why Augustine argued that there is a trace of the Trinity in every creature.

Out of this loving abundance, Father, Son, and Spirit have bound themselves to the world from the very beginning. Leaving this mark, making humanity in their image, the divine communion of Father, Son, and Spirit presents an image of the very community God intended for the world, a communion God continues to call us further into, even as Christ works to restore the way.

This is indeed a comforting premise. It is a creation story that reaches from the beginning of time and continues in even the smallest moment of our present day. The goodness of God can be seen in the daily activities of an immense and amazing world. Into this picture of God’s creation, the Christian imagination sees a world called to participate in its origin story, to “taste and see that the Lord is good,” to delight in God as maker of all things, and so join in the fellowship of a creative Trinity. Today and from the beginning, we are neither alone nor without purpose; we were made and we are being remade by the Father, Son, and Spirit, the maker of heaven and earth.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) John 1:1-4.

(2) Colossians 1:15-17.

(3) Psalm 33:6.

(4) Jürgen Moltmann as quoted in Donald McKim, Introducing the Reformed Faith (Louisville: John Knox Press, 2001), 40.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry –  Agnostics Welcome

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The beliefs we hold and our view of God seem to collide with life experiences, particularly events that cause pain. From my observations, one of the struggles we face during these times is having confidence in what we should think and feel. We ask questions like, “Is it okay for me to be questioning God?” or, “Is it okay for me to be uncertain of my faith?”

Uncertainty and doubt within belief are some of the most uncomfortable, and yet most common, issues of faith that Christians face. In his essay “The Agnostic,” the late author and preacher F.W. Boreham touches on this topic when he describes two conversations he had with fellow train passengers. During each stop the train would make, Boreham found enjoyment looking out onto the platform. He was intrigued to see who was departing from the train and who was entering. At one of the stops he was rudely interrupted by another passenger entering his compartment. The intruding passenger entered in “heavily laden with suitcase, rugs, books, papers, umbrella, overcoat, and other odds and ends.” Boreham had been taken by surprise by this as he did not see this man entering from the train platform. The man explained that the reason he was not seen on the platform was because he was already on the train and was simply now moving to another compartment.

As they rode, Boreham slowly began to recognize the man. He belonged to a church where Boreham had spoken. The man expressed to him why he wanted to move: he had been sitting next to an agnostic in another area of the train before the last stop. To make matters even more difficult for the Christian man, the agnostic had been reading The Life of Huxley, a book about the English biologist and revered agnostic of the nineteenth century, Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley actually coined the word “agnostic” to describe his own beliefs. After listening to the agnostic and noticing what he was reading, the Christian man decided to move seats during the next train stop.

Boreham listened to the man’s story and was not sure how to respond. He continued to chat with his new friend for approximately one hour. While the train was slowing down for its next stop, Boreham began to gather his luggage. His friend inquired whether this was his stop. Boreham said, “Oh no…but I’m going into the next compartment for awhile. The fact is, I have a weakness for any man who is fond of Huxley.” He added playfully, “I’m a bit of an agnostic myself!”[1]

Boreham soon finds the agnostic whom his travel companion had grumpily left. He settles into a seat near the man. He soon discovers that the agnostic did in fact deduce why the other man had left but was uncertain whether he understood what he meant by agnostic. He started to explain this to Boreham.

But, of course, when I say that I’m an agnostic, I mean that I’m an agnostic. Like Huxley, I simply do not know. I was brought up in Church and Sunday school; but I’ve been very hard hit since then. I lost my wife; then I lost my money; and I’ve just been up to town to bury my only child. Somehow, the easy-going faith of my boyhood has fallen to pieces. It wouldn’t stand the strain.[2]

The man feels confused and is looking for anyone who can relate to these feelings of uncertainty and bewilderment. He was reading Huxley because Huxley, too, had experienced loss and pain.

 

I Simply Don’t Know

As I ponder this story, I think that many, if not all of us, have faced or will face a similar crisis that this man experienced. The beliefs we hold and our view of God seem to collide with life experiences, particularly events that cause pain. From my observations, one of the struggles we face during these times is having confidence in what we should think and feel. We ask questions like, “Is it okay for me to be questioning God?” Or, “Is it okay for me to be uncertain of my faith?” As believers, we tend to feel a strange discomfort and consternation when uncertainty becomes a lingering feeling in our faith.

The agnostic explains to Boreham that even though the word “agnostic” might be fraught with deeply negative feelings, the man is only saying that he does not know! For the person who believes in God or for the unbeliever who simply does not know, there is great encouragement to be taken from the Bible, particularly in how God, in Jesus Christ, relates to agnostics.

Jesus was always interacting with those who were not sure of him. In fact, he actually enjoyed engaging with those who doubted God. After hearing about Jesus Christ of Nazareth, a man named Nathanael quips, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” (John 1:46). Nathanael was questioning—and in one sense—rejecting Jesus simply on the basis of where he was from. Nazareth was a small town of no more than 2,000 people. Soon after Nathanael makes these comments, Jesus speaks to Nathanael and reveals something of who he is. In this case, the key point to understand is not only what Jesus did in showing who he was, but the fact that he engaged with Nathanael in conversation despite Nathanael’s skepticism.[3] The skeptical lens through which Nathanael viewed Jesus did not provide a deterrent for Jesus to befriend him.

The Gospel accounts tell many stories in which Jesus’s closest friends doubted him and simply did not understand who he was even when he did extraordinary things. One instance is the story of Jesus calming a storm. Matthew 8:23-27 tells us that Jesus was with his disciples on the sea. While on the water, they encounter a tempestuous storm. The weather conditions were so severe that they did not think they would live through the event. And to make matters worse for these disciples, Jesus was sleeping through it all! The disciples wake him up. Jesus promptly calms the wind and the waves.

After having their lives saved by Jesus, the disciples talk amongst themselves saying, “Who is this man?” Jesus responds, “You of little faith, why are you so afraid?” The English term “little faith” is translated from the Greek term for “ineffective,” “defective,” or “deficient” faith. In other words, Jesus is telling his disciples that they do not really know who he is; in fact, they had a “deficient” knowledge of who he was. He instructs them to find out who he is.

Just by observing Jesus’s inner circle of friends, we see that agnostics are welcome in Christianity. Jesus did not simply invite people who understood who he was. When he invited people to follow him, many began a journey that would slowly reveal how little they actually knew about him and who God really was.

There is something beautiful about the way in which Jesus Christ interacts with agnostics. He does not condemn their state of belief or lack thereof. He simply invites them to continue on their journey. He says essentially, “Come a little further and find out who I am.” One of the remarkable points of the Christian faith is that discovering who God is does not depend upon our intellectual ability or our emotional strength and stamina. God has actually come to us. The many stories of Jesus in the Gospels show us myriad examples of Jesus initiating the conversation.

Yes, the invitation is for us to continue asking questions and seeking God, but while we do that, we have the assurance that He has pursued us first. The implicit message that Jesus gave to the crowds, his friends, and followers in first-century Palestine is the same message he gives to us today: “Agnostics Welcome.”

Nathan Betts is a graduate of the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics and a member of the speaking team at RZIM Canada.

 

[1] “The Agnostic” in F.W. Boreham, When the Swans Fly High, available online athttps://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?id=121475236386&story_fbid=10151536213416387(accessed on July 7, 2014).

[2] Ibid.

[3] See John 1:43-51.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry –   THINK AGAIN: LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS

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+ Light in the Darkness

The story is told of a cynic sitting under a nut tree, carrying on a jesting monologue with God. His grounds for complaint lay in what he considered to be an obvious failure on the part of God to go by the book on structural design. “Lord,” he said, “How is it that you made such a large and sturdy tree to hold such tiny, almost weightless nuts? And yet, you made small, tender plants to hold such large and weighty watermelons!”

As he chuckled at the folly of such disproportion in God’s mindless universe, a nut suddenly fell on his head. After a stunned pause, he muttered, “Thank God that wasn’t a watermelon!”

Even atheist Aldous Huxley acknowledged years ago, “Science has ‘explained’ nothing; the more we know, the more fantastic the world becomes, and the profounder the surrounding darkness.”

Justifiable worldviews must have explanatory power of the undeniable realities of life. As Christians who affirm the existence of a loving and all wise God, we long to push back the darkness in our world and to see the light of God’s Word soften the cynic and atheist alike. Yet if we are honest, sometimes we, too, struggle to come to terms with God’s world and his sovereign design; this is especially true in seasons of suffering and confusion.

Remember Job? He had become weary of his pain and sought a just answer for it. He built his argument to God on the fact that he needed to know what was going on, because only on the basis of that knowledge could his confusion and suffering be dissipated. But God then broke his silence, challenging Job’s very assumptions and reminding him that there was an awful lot he did not know but had just accepted and believed by inference. Notwithstanding the proverbial cynic under a nut tree, the argument from design is the very approach God used with Job. He reminded Job as a first step, and only that, that there were a thousand and one things he did not fully understand but had just taken for granted. In the light of God’s presence, Job was dumbfounded and confessed, “I am unworthy—how can I reply to you? … Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know” (Job 40:4; 42:3).

Gaining a small glimpse of the majesty and holiness of God is light in a dark world. The prophet Isaiah described his awe-stricken state when God revealed Himself to him. Isaiah, a morally good man, nevertheless fell on his face and immediately sensed that he was unfit to be in God’s presence. He was not just in the presence of someone better than he was. He was in the presence of the One by whom and because of whom all purity finds its point of reference. That is why he was speechless.

God is not merely good. God is holy. He is the transcendent source of goodness: not merely “better” in a hierarchy of choices but rather the very basis from which all differences are made. He dwells in ineffable light. Moral categories, for us, often move in comparisons and hierarchies. We talk in terms of judging or feeling that one thing is better than another. Our culture is more advanced morally than someone else’s culture, at least so we may think. However, God’s existence changes those categories and moves us to recognize the very essence of what the word “goodness” is based upon.

This difference is what makes the argument almost impossible for a skeptic to grasp. Holiness is not merely goodness. “Why did God not create us to choose only good?” “Why do bad things happen to good people?” The reality is that the opposite of evil, in degree, may be goodness. But the opposite of absolute evil, in kind, is absolute holiness. In the biblical context, the idea of holiness is the tremendous “otherness” of God Himself. God does not just reveal Himself as good; He reveals Himself as holy.

There is no contradiction in Him. He can never self-destruct. He can never “not be.” He exists eternally and in a sublime purity that transcends a hierarchy of categories. As human beings we love the concept of holiness when we are in the right, but we are often reticent to apply it when we are wrong and brought under the stark scrutiny of its light. I recall talking to a very successful businessman who throughout our conversation repeatedly asked, “But what about all the evil in this world?” Finally, a friend sitting next to me said to him, “I hear you constantly expressing a desire to see a solution to the problem of evil around you. Are you as troubled by the problem of evil within you?” In the pin-drop silence that followed, the man’s face showed his duplicity.

The longer I have encountered this question about evil, the more convinced I am of the disingenuousness of many a questioner. The darkness of evil is more than an exterior reality that engenders suffering in our world; it is, at its core, an internal reality that systemically builds us for autonomy and destruction, blinds us, and from which only God is big enough to rescue us. You see, the problem of evil begins with me. The darkness is within.

Yet Jesus’s answer to the question of the blind man in John 9 brings us extraordinary power and hope. There is an illustration and explanation for us in his story. Here was a man living in physical darkness. There was no light that he could see. People wanted to know, why was he born this way? They were the ones who could see, so they asked about the one who could not. Jesus responded that the man’s blindness was due neither to the sin of the man nor of his parents, but so that the glory of God might be displayed. The lesson is drastic; the message profound.

Physical darkness has physical consequences and leaves a person bereft of seeing physical reality. It is a tragedy—but nowhere near the tragic devastation of spiritual blindness. The healing of that man’s blindness by Jesus was intended to draw those spiritually blind to seek his healing of their souls. When Beethoven, though deaf, could see the exhilarating response of the people to his composition, he outwardly resonated with what his inner being prompted. He could not hear his music but he sensed the harmony for which he longed in expression. So it is with us. We know on the inside how impoverished we are and for what we long. That ought to prompt us to the riches that only God in Christ is able to give to us.

Only when we surrender to the light of God’s truth in our own lives are we enabled to truly seeand then be a beacon of hope and healing in our dark world. Truthfulness in the heart, said Jesus, precedes truth in the objective realm. The problem of evil has ultimately one source: it is the resistance to God’s holiness that enshrouds all of creation. And there is ultimately only one hope for life: that is through the glorious display of God at work within a human soul, bringing about his work of pushing away the darkness. That transformation tenderizes the heart to become part of the solution and not part of the problem. Such a transformation begins at the Cross.

The day when Christ was crucified and darkness engulfed the scene was symbolic of the soul in rebellion. Then came the possibility of hope when the Son rose, with life made possible for all of us. The simple verse, John 3:16, says it all: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” “For God”: the starting point is filial. “So loved”: his reach is relational. “That he gave his only begotten Son”: sacrificial. “That whosoever believes in Him”: confessional. “Should not perish”: judicial. “But have everlasting life”: eternal.

There is a law unto death. The violation of law brings that within us. Our holy God deals with evil in us to transform us and draw us into his life and embrace. What a glorious gospel this is.

The songwriter Tim Hughes says it beautifully:

Light of the world, You stepped down into darkness

opened my eyes, let me see.

Beauty that made this heart adore you

hope of a life spent with you.

 

Here I am to worship, here I am to bow down,

here I am to say that you’re my God.

You’re altogether lovely, altogether worthy,

altogether wonderful to me.

 

In a unique way, seeing is believing. Believing in God is surrendering. Surrendering to God is worshiping. To worship opens up vistas to see even more. Darkness is then vanquished.

In a dark world, we have the offer of Light through Jesus Christ.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry –  Losing Ground

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Mine is not a heritage that deeply associates identity with the land on which that identity was forged. My ancestors packed every belonging they were able to place on a boat (including, I’m certain much to someone’s chagrin, a nine foot corner cupboard) and eventually made their way to Ohio. It was not easy for them; Irish immigrants were not well-received. But they made a life for themselves far away from all they once knew as home, choosing to distance themselves from the land of their forefathers in more ways than one. They even changed the spelling of their surname so that “home” would be less recognizable. For some immigrants, the land they leave is never far from their minds—and often this is true even of the generations who have never seen this land for themselves. This was not the case with my ancestors.

It was not until I spent time within a Native American community (and later the intertwining worlds of the Palestinians and Israelis) that I came to realize the powerful pull of a homeland, even for those who hold it only in the imaginative longings of their minds. For those of us who view land in terms of property lines and economics, there is a giant chasm that separates us from those who define geography as life and spirit. The tragic role of geography in the story of every Native American tribe is easily recognizable, but the spiritual, personal, and physical weight of that offense is often grossly miscalculated. “To us when your land is gone, you are walking toward a slow spiritual death,” says a Shoshone elder who has fought persistently for access to Shoshone land. “We have come to the point that death is better than living without your spirituality.”(1)

Such intensity in the name of place and homeland is not unique to Native America. For the people of ancient Israel, the relationship between land and faith was equally profound. The destructive loss of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians in 587 B.C.E. was infinitely more to them than the loss of home and property. For them it was the loss of faith, identity, and God’s presence. Walter Brueggemann writes of Jerusalem’s destruction: “The deep sense of displacement evoked by the loss led to the conclusion in some quarters that all the old promises of YHWH to Israel—and consequently Israel’s status as YHWH’s people and Jerusalem’s status as YHWH’s city—were placed in deep jeopardy.”(2)

The book of Lamentations is intricately bound to this all-encompassing loss. The book offers five poems of profound lament, each an attempt to put into words the abrupt reality of physical, spiritual, and personal exile. The poems are acrostic in style, meaning that each line of the poem begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet—as if the loss and grief of Israel is “expressed in totality and completeness from A to Z.”(3) Like an ancient funeral song, the writer’s words are consumed with the death that is homelessness in this deepest sense of the word.

“The thought of my affliction and my homelessness

is wormwood and gall!

My soul continually thinks of it

and is bowed down within me” (Lamentations 3:19-20).

For lives in exiled disarray, spirits torn from their homes, these words declare a misery deeper than many of us know. Yet this is not to say it is a misery unknown. On the contrary, the ache of homelessness is a well-recognized human experience. Though I am not among third and fourth generations of immigrants who hold visions of their homelands near, this does not at all suggest that the mark of lostness is foreign. Unexplained hope for a better land, longing for a place unknown but somehow known, feeling like a stranger though at home—such thoughts plague the most nomadic among us.

The writer of Lamentations gives voice to the uncertainty of exile, the finality of a destroyed Jerusalem, and the death of home in the deepest sense. But the writer also dares give voice in the midst of exile to the promise of restoration—in the assurance of coming home to one who never left. No matter the place of loss, wandering, or exile, no matter the distance, no matter the depth, the arm of God is not too short to save.

“But this I call to mind,

and therefore I have hope:

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases,

his mercies never come to an end;

they are new every morning;

great is your faithfulness.

‘The LORD is my portion,’ says my soul,

‘therefore I will hope in him’” (Lamentations 3:21-24).

Why should there be the notion of homelessness at all, if there is no such thing as home? Surely there is one who prepares a room for us, one who answers every real and imaginative longing for a homeland, every injustice of being torn from one’s home, and the mountains of sin and sorrow which block our vision of our place forever at his table. For both the wanderer and the exile, surely there is immense hope in a kingdom that is both present and coming, a homecoming we now see in part but one day will experience face to face.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Sandy Johnson, ed., The Book of Elders (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1994), 127.

(2) Walter Brueggemann, An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), 334.

(3) Ibid., 335.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Cracks in the Concrete

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As a homeowner, I have come to appreciate more seriously the struggle with nature and its impact on the manmade structures it faces. Carefully poured concrete is no real obstacle to insistent tree roots or pushy weeds that seem not to know that their role is to stay down or, in this case, under the concrete.

It strikes me as somewhat of an analogy of our times. For the last half of the twentieth century it was loudly and publically proclaimed that God is dead. No less a reputable publication than Time magazine boldly announced this very sentiment in the 60s. Of course, from my view, God seems to have an uncanny way of overcoming his human-imposed demise, so we should not be surprised that, social prognostications aside, God as a being, object of interest, and subject will not go away.

Those who have been dubbed the New Atheists see the killing of God not only as an issue but as a cause to champion. Their hopes and goals, often loudly stated, are for the eradication or at least the confinement of any and all religious expression. What a burden it is that the majority of humanity does not have the wisdom, insight, education, or public savvy of “the Brights” (their term for themselves as a means of contrast with the rest of the dull, god-fearing world).(1) For indeed, the majority of mankind at the present, across history, and in all cultures has been and is inveterately drawn to some pursuit of God, the gods, or transcendence.

Of course, this human majority may simply be confused, incorrectly evolved, or inadequately adapted, as is argued by new atheists. But surely to a discipline that claims to be scientific or rational, the phenomenon demands some kind of explanation beyond mere mockery or outright rejection. Is it possible, is it conceivable, dare we imply, could there be something to the divine notion to which the mass of humanity is responding?(2)

At this juncture, an enlightened critic pulls out the “projection” argument. Leaning on Freud, we are to understand that our sense of divinity, our awe at nature, or our longing for coherence is really a transference of sublimated fear. God, they claim, is an emotional crutch, a self-creation to assuage our deep-seated insecurities and fears. Paul Vitz of New York University has ably answered this in his book, Faith of the Fatherless, where he subjects both this theory to some critical analysis and the analyzers to their own analysis and all come up wanting.

You see, beyond the doubts, the theories, and the speculations, we are still left with a nagging question. What if there really is something—or someone—there? The ordering of reality, the complexity of existence, the fine-tuning of the universe, the demanding components essential to life that are both present and constant—it all seems to stretch credulity and common sense to ascribe it to chance and necessity. As someone once said, you need to be careful when you take your skepticism for a walk in the park or a stroll by the sea. There is so much in this world that seems to hint at something more.

The so-called secularization thesis (the idea that society would become less religious as it becomes more modern) is not being played out on the world scene, despite some parts of Europe and the United States. In the now iconic movie The Matrix, the hero Neo struggles with questions about “the real.” He is not alone. If the world is a created order, if it has the designer’s fingerprints upon it, if there are “traces” of his handiwork all around, then all the concrete (or aggressive arguments) in the world will not keep the idea down.

It all reminds me of a dialogue I once had with a serious skeptic. At the end of some lengthy exchange on the existence or non-existence of God, my conversation partner reached out, put a hand on my shoulder, and with just a touch of polite condescension asked me, “What if there is no God?” Clearly feeling he had raised a question that I hadn’t considered, he simply smiled. As we parted, I put my hand on his shoulder and asked him, “What if there is?” In order to find out, all we need to do is ask!

Stuart McAllister is regional director for the Americas at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brights_movement.

(2) Cf. Ecclesiastes 3:11, Romans 1:18-20, Psalm 1).

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – To Lighten Our Darkness

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The Louvre began as a fortress to keep lurking enemies at bay. It is today the world’s most visited museum—home of more than 35,000 works of art—and the lurkers are mostly friendly. Though apparently, in the midst of the hype over Dan Brown’s best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code, you could not stand in the museum’s grand hallways without hearing rumors of hidden messages, long-lost documents, and scandalous secrets. The Louvre had a record 7.55 million visitors that year of the book’s best-selling, and curators were bracing themselves for the release of the movie.

Like many, I am easily taken with a good mystery. There is something fantastic about lurking clues or ‘long-lost’ anything. Growing up around my mother’s antique store, I used to imagine we were harboring treasures unbeknownst to us. In every old painting was the possibility of a document hidden behind it, in every dresser drawer the possibility of a trinket that would change our lives. But I discovered something else in this antique store: the thing about treasures, theories, and mysteries sheathed in darkness is that they always seem to lose something in the light. Like a novel whose ending we’re not quite ready to discover, the obscurity of mystery enthralls us—perhaps even more than the possibility it seeing it solved.

That imaginations once caught up in The Da Vinci Code excitement seem to have fizzled is perhaps further evidence of the phenomenon. One of the raucous claims made by the book is that “almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false.” Multitudes were hushed at the possibilities. These were words in the mouth of a fictional character (if Brown’s own polemic), but it was a mysterious theory that captured imaginations by storm. Beginning with a great gathering of influential bishops in the fourth century, Brown drew readers in with the shadows of controversy. At this council, he argued, two new theories were put into play, changing the church forever and making impregnable its circle of control: the divinity of Christ and the infallibility of Scripture.

In fact, this gathering of men in dark hallways of antiquity was called the Council of Nicaea, which commenced in 325 at the call of Roman Emperor Constantine. In reality, the underlying faith confessed at Nicaea was bred amidst controversy. But it was hardly the conspiracy Brown describes. It was not a gathering of men contriving words in mystery and shadow, but a gathering of men squinting at the mystery of light. How do you put into words the logistics of the Trinity? How do you describe the two natures of Christ? Was Jesus equal to God or subordinate? What do we mean when we call Christ Lord?

The Council of Nicaea was a gathering of bishops from around the world who sought to unravel the mess of conflicting schools of thought. Up until this point they had few formal means to sort through variant teachings and emerging groups, but church leaders recognized that they were at something of a theological crossroads. Presenting the most formidable challenge to New Testament teaching was a theologian named Arius of Alexandria. Arius envisioned Christ as superior to creation, yet not fully God. It is along Arian lines of thinking that Dan Brown molds his shadowy interpretation of history. Jesus, he argues, was not God; he was a prophet at best, made into something much more.

The Council of Nicaea rejected such thinking, though not on grounds of power and deception, as Brown suggests. On grounds of reason and historical belief, they acknowledged Christ as the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.”(1) The Council recognized in the affirmations of the earliest Christians (including baptismal creeds that spoke in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) a distinct acknowledgement of Jesus’s divinity. If Jesus was not fully God, he was not really God at all, and to worship him was idolatry. On the contrary—as spoken from his own lips, as recorded in extra-biblical writings, as affirmed in the dark hallways of antiquity—Jesus is Lord.

In our best attempts to consider God, wrote Augustine, we are essentially asking the everlasting Light to “lighten our darkness.” The shadows of mystery and suspense are captivating, but there we are not meant to reside. May it be in a pursuit of truth and not a love of obscurity that we look to the mysteries of Christ and the decisive events of history. Light has come into the world; we need not move toward darkness to find ourselves standing in awe.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Excerpt from the Nicene Creed.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry –  The Trail and the Cross

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Mention the word ‘immigration’ in conversation, and you are likely to get an earful from a variety of perspectives. Political debates notwithstanding, the topic has sprung up again in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo and Jewish hostages being killed in Paris. Once a colonial power France’s colonized peoples have often come ‘home’ to try to find a better life. The influx of immigrants has brought both opportunity and challenge. Sadly, some immigrant communities report being marginalized from the opportunities a city like Paris affords. Kept on the sidelines a deep frustration and futility festers.

In the United States, a refuge for immigrants from its beginning, the indigenous people of this land often suffered by being pushed to the margins. One tragic episode of marginalization was “The Trail of Tears.” This ‘trail’ was the forced relocation of the Cherokee Nation from their home among the mountains of North Georgia to the plains of Oklahoma.(1) In one of the saddest episodes of the fledgling democracy of the United States, men, women, and children were taken from their land, herded into makeshift forts with minimal facilities and food, and then forced to march a thousand miles. Human loss for the first groups of Cherokee removed from North Georgia was extremely high. While records reflect differing accounts of casualties, some estimate that about 4000 Cherokee died as a result of the removal.

The story of Native American relocation is now a part of the history of the developing United States, where the North Georgia story is not unique. Activists for Native American causes remind those who have ears to hear that other trails of tears were forged in the land from east to west. While there have always been minority voices protesting against these federal government policies concerning relocation, including Davy Crockett (better known for his failed stand at the Texas Alamo), they were few and far between.(2) The country that had swelled on a tide of freedom also had an undertow of injustice toward its indigenous peoples.

In human terms, the death of Jesus by crucifixion demonstrates a horrible injustice committed against him. While Christians believe that God was at work even in the midst of this act of injustice, Jesus had committed no crime deserving this form of execution reserved for the worst criminals. He was betrayed by one closest to him, falsely accused, tortured, and nailed to the cross. Formal theology looks at the “injustice” of the crucifixion and seeks to explain the meaning of the event. Some theologians suggest that the atonement stands as the preeminent example of a sacrificial life in the face of injustice—an example which followers of Jesus are called to model in their own lives. Others see the Cross as the ultimate symbol of divine love or a demonstration of God’s divine justice against sin as the violation of his perfect law. Still others suggest the Cross overcame the forces of sin and evil, restored God’s honor in relation to God’s holiness and righteousness, and served as a substitution for the death we all deserved because of sin.(3)

While the meaning of the atonement may include a portion of all of these theories, I wonder about how the atonement might bring meaning to events like those suffered by Native peoples. And I wonder about how the atonement speaks to the personal injustices we all suffer, or commit against one another. Does the reality of the atonement give present meaning to the injustices experienced and felt by many in today’s world?

The word atonement itself indicates that the willing offer by Jesus to bear the injustices of the world creates the possibility to be at one, set right with God, and with one another. The apostle Paul indicates this in his second letter to the Corinthian Christians: “Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and he has committed to us the word of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18-19).

Christians believe that the enactment of reconciliation by God even through the human injustice perpetrated against Jesus, enjoins them to a ministry of reconciliation and justice. And the word of reconciliation—namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world—frees all who would receive this forgiveness to offer the ministry of reconciling forgiveness to one another. Forgiveness, then, creates the possibility for justice.

While at a local church gathering, I was introduced to a ministry that works with urban-dwelling Native Americans. Most are homeless and many struggle with alcohol and drug addiction. Even today, many dwell on the margins. Like me, these individuals are far removed from the Trail of Tears. But like me, this organization wonders what meaning to assign to a tragic past. Clearly, all of us carry the events of our past into our present lives. In some cases, painful hurts and histories have ongoing repercussions. Cycles of violence, addiction, and despair are shaped, in part, by the meaning assigned to these past events. Therefore, this ministry seeks to reassign new meaning to difficult pasts through reconciliation and forgiveness.

In the same way, Christians who affirm the atonement of Jesus also affirm a God who enjoins them to do justice on behalf of others. The atonement creates meaning for the past that is redemptive for the present. Those who recognize both the need for forgiveness and the need to offer forgiveness, give meaning to all who need atonement today. Seen this way, the crucifixion is not simply another act of injustice perpetrated against Jesus, the atonement brings life, as surely as it binds us to give life to others.

Margaret Manning Shull is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bellingham, Washington.

(1) “The Trail of Tears,” About North Georgia, http://ngeorgia.com/history/nghisttt.html, accessed February 16, 2010.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Theories of the atonement as highlighted in Millard Erickson, Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1983), 781-823.

Ravi Zacharias
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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Archives of Humanity

Sharman Robertson strolls down an aisle of metal shelves and well-aligned file boxes, stopping midway to pull one down and into her arms. It is box B3F.1 and inside it are the remnants of Mother’s Day 1931—in greeting cards. Robertson is corporate archivist at Hallmark Cards, keeper of a vast history in pictures and poems. “You could launch 500 dissertations from the material here,” notes her interviewer, “from gender studies or marketing to design or art history to psychology or anthropology.”(1)

Card companies speak openly about the changing dynamics of culture and its affects on card-writing. There are categories and identified-groups today that would never have crossed card-makers’ minds decades earlier. Whether it is a changing culture or an expanding market that has had the most influence is hard to say—likely, it is both. Mothers have been adopting for years; they just haven’t always had an entire line of cards that focused on it. Yet despite the growing number of targeted relationships, there are still a great number of people who find card-shopping an exercise in missing the mark. More than once before a wall of cards, I’ve suspected I didn’t fit into a Hallmark category. But I wonder if more accurately it’s that the categories don’t really fit any of us. It’s not that the things said on my mother’s day cards aren’t real; it’s just that my mom is so much more real than anything a card could ever articulate for me.

Scripture’s unadorned images of motherhood do not fit neatly into categories either. Naomi was embittered by the death of her husband and her two young sons. Rebekah conspired with her son to trick her ailing husband. Sarah, Hannah, Michal, and Elizabeth—among others—suffered the despair and scorn of barren wombs. The parents of the prodigal son faced the blatant disregard of their youngest child and the exuberant relief of his return. Mary sang with hope when she learned she would have a son. Later, she would watch him die an agonizing death. Like those we celebrate on Mother’s Day, the women we find in Scripture tell their stories from a vast array of settings and situations. They come to us scheming or flourishing or despairing, silenced or prayerful or with a strength we can hardly fathom, but the confrontation is always real.

The humanity found in the Bible is not often something we stop to consider. Maybe it is more comfortable to try to line up with images of life on greeting cards than with these stories of struggle and desperation, mystery and bravery. And yet, it is in this very story weighted with every complexity of our humanness that God became human himself. To real and wanting people, a God in real flesh came near.

Hannah’s hopeful voice comes as she finds the courage to express her grief and position, and it is here that she finds God. The story imparts: “In bitterness of soul Hannah wept much and prayed to the LORD. And she made a vow, saying, ‘O LORD Almighty, if you will only look upon your servant’s misery and remember me, and not forget your servant but give her a son, then I will give him to the LORD for all the days of his life.’”(2) In tearful honesty, she sought God. And Hannah’s pain in childlessness became her child’s link to God.

The images of motherhood in Scripture give us insights into our ourselves, into our mothers, into the pain of lost hope, the ache of longed-for identities, the startling gift of prayer, and the beauty of faith. Many of these women describe what it’s like to feel abandoned by God, to cry out as with nothing—and everything—to lose. Their lives encourage us to seek God where God can be found, even along roads that aren’t what we expected. Their real and difficult stories are given a place in Christ’s story, and this speaks volumes into our own.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Ted Anthony, “Mother’s Day Cards Change With Time,” Associated Press, May. 7, 1999.

(2) 1 Samuel 1:10-11.